Followers.

There are some extensive areas of ground in this country where mining and excavations for coal and excavations for taking out chalk for use as a fertiliser and making lime and others for extracting sand and gravel may have made the ground unstable. The surface of the ground under deep and shallow excavations below the surface may well be subject to periodic, unpredictable subsidence.

Where it is known that ground may be unstable and there is no ready means of predicting the possibility of mass movement of the subsoil and it is expedient to build, a solution is to use some form of reinforced concrete raft under the whole of’ the buildings, as illustrated in Fig. 5.

The concrete raft, which is cast on or just below the surface, is designed to spread the load of the building over the whole of the underside of the raft so that in a sense the raft floats on the surface.